Attack types.

So, you have a spread of maybe 3-5 characters. There are three kinds of attack - Special, conditional and default- and each character has one attack of each kind. Exactly what those attacks are and what they do depends on the character and how they've been customised.

I'm fairly happy with this idea - it seems to have a lot of good design space.. Lots of things that can be done with it, lots of room for players to be clever and not too much option bloat.

I should explain what the attack types mean. They're listed in order of priority:

A special attack is usually particularly strong. This is because each turn only one of your characters can use a special attack. That's the only decision you make each turn; which of your characters will use a special, or choosing to pass and have no character use a special.

The conditional attacks can be quirky. They're defined not just by what effect they have, but under what conditions they are used.

Default attacks are what a character will use if you didn't tell them to use a special and the conditions for their conditional attack are not met. These are usually simple and uncomplicated/boring.

Conditionals are the clever bit here. Although you only make decisions regarding specials, you'll be trying to manipulate the game to maximise use of your conditionals and hinder your opponent's. They also give characters a bit of variety in how they act, even when you're not directly controlling them.

Examples will probably help. Let's come up with a theoretical set of attacks for a hermit crab-type guy.

Special: Shear claw. 3 damage to opposing enemy.
Conditional: Retreat into shell. When at 2 health or less, gain one armour and two regeneration.
Default: Pinch. 1 damage to opposing enemy.

So, generally he makes a weak attack, but if he's been badly wounded, he'll hide and try to recover. This is potentially useful, but since it prevents him from attacking it's a double edged sword. Fortunately you can override that with his powerful special attack if you need to.

So if you're using this hermit crab guy effectively, your tactics will probably revolve around keeping him healthy via healing effects or using his special to keep up the pressure late game.

Notice how the conditional isn't just another attack, it defines his behaviour absent player intervention. This is what I think is interesting about it. It gives characters a kind of personality. And because you can vary both the trigger and the effect, there's a potentially huge amount of variety possible here. Conditionals can be advantages, drawbacks, or neither.

They also make "AI" for enemy teams of characters almost unnecessary. I reckon you could just have the computer activate a random character's special and because of conditionals, it'd still result in a fairly varied and natural-seeming play. Clever design of conditionals for world enemies can also give them variety and personality without needing to tell the computer how to handle them - it's all done by the same basic ruleset.

Random conditional ideas:
* Alpha strike. Powerful attack triggers only on the first round of combat.
* Laziness. Character does nothing - triggers only on first round of combat.
* Second wind. Character heals themselves if they only have 1 hit point left - important to try and play around this if you see an enemy with it.
* Combo strike. Triggers if you used a default attack last turn. This makes for a in character that goes "Attack A, attack B, attack A, attack B".
* Charged strike. Triggers if you used a special last turn. The special is some kind of charging-up move and the conditional next turn is the real reason to use it.
* Last man standing. A more powerful attack that is used when this is the your only character left. Another one to play around.
* Vs X. Triggers when you're opposite an eney character of type X, dragon, giant, wizard, swordsman, whatever.
* Status effect. Triggers whenever your opponent lacks the status effect this inflicts. This means the character will try to put an effect on the enemy, and then refresh it when it expires.

And so on. I think it has potential.

Who watches the limes?

These were done just for fun - not as part of the compiled limes poster. Well, that's not entirely true. While I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for lime ideas I did a quick+easy Dr Manhattan lime and a Rorschach-masked lime (radioactive and sociopathic sabre-toothed limes, respectively). But then I thought better of it - I wanted the limes poster to be somewhere between KoL-based and generic. Other-media references that weren't already KoL mainstays (like the protagonist) didn't deserve a look-in.

And then I got inspired so I sidelined those two watchlimes and got on with making more proper limes.

But yeah, I came back to them. Gave Rorschach a hat and decided to try and do the whole lot. It seemed a fun kind of challenge. After all, Rorschach and Manhattan were the low-hanging fruit.

I like The ozymandius lime. He's recognisably him, despite not actually having that particular hair style in the book. It works though I think.

Sally Jupiter was the hardest, sicne she doesn't have a gimmick. Her long hair feels a little like a cheat, but there you go.

Comedian was the last one I did, and my favourite. I like the scar, though I should probably have moved it closer to the tooth so it was more obviously intruding on the mouth for his signature smile.

Silliness: I arranged them in the order that they first appear in the book, Ozy excepted for obvious reasons. Maybe that means I should have put the smiley-lime at the top? Meh.

Citrus explosion

Here's the rest of the limes. Seventy seven. Well, seventy-six, counting the n'est pas une lime. Even less if you count the skewered/sliced limes proportionally. And past that awkward questions arise about whether if the snow lime isn't really a lime, why is the plexiglass one? So let's just call it seventy-seven and leave it at that.

Limes of note:

Limebat - KoL features a variety of very silly bats. Limebat is conspicuous by its absence. Until now!

Mariachi lime - Should I have given him a moustache? An enormous moustache seems appropriate, but the sombrero seems enough. Not all of them can be OTT.

Lime in a coconut - Very silly. Very very silly. Fun.

Ninja/bandit - The bandit is probably the crappest of the limes. See, the "joke" is that he's just the ninja lime with the mask inverted. Which probably amuses nobody but me, since everyone just said he looked like a ninja turtle. He became more and more acceptable to me as I added more limes to distract from him.

Poisonous amazon sabre-toothed tree-lime - This is another one that's mainly funny to me. I just find the idea of Poisonous amazon tree-*s to be intrinsically funny. Like ducks. Or fridges. Poisonous amazon sabre-toothed tree-fridges are too funny to ever be depicted by human hands.

Anime lime - You try anime-ising something with no eyes. I think it came out ok considering, but I feel a little guilty including it because it's not terribly KoLish (already had a protagonist lime for that) and it looks incredibly lame when people try to parody anime-style and get it wrong. I keep looking back to this guy with scepticism, but I guess that mouth's passable.

Cubist lime - I'm pretty sure that anyone who actually groks cubism will think the same of my cubist lime as i think of most attempts to parody an anime/manga style.

Plexiglass lime - Probably my favourite. The plexiglass effect came together unexpectedly easily.

Brimstone lime - Necessary to complete the ascension rewards, but an arse and a half to do. Still not happy with it. I mean, the brimstone effect looks good to me. It seems a nice compromise between the KoL graphics for brimstone (glittery rock) and something that looks ok next to the plexi, but the shape of the lime is lost and the whole thing just seems flat. Not going back to this bastard any time soon though.

Harem lime - This was one of the OTT limes. Lots of detail, but it seemed kind of necessary to make her (or him!) properly haremish.

Giant lime - KoL giants are distinguished by having beards. Applying this to a lime amuses me. I guess that actually making him huge as well works against the joke, but it would be a bit weird otherwise.

Pygmy limes and assault squad - These are pretty faithful lime version of the KoL monsters. I probably shouldn't have double-dipped the pygmy thing for two limes, but a pygmy lime next to the giant lime seems obvious. And doing things like "pygmy lime", "pygmy lime assault squad" amuses me. I did it with the Hey Deze lime, Limebat and Hey Deze limebat further up too. I came this close to doing a batlime, but couldn't work out where in the order it should come for optimum hilarity.

Tiger lime - It made sense in my head, ok?

Lime mime - I like this guy. He's another "how do I do this with no eyes?" deal. The teardrop makes it. Eye makeup that doesn't require eyes. Without it he just looks like nothing in particular.

Lobotomised lime - This one nearly felt cheap to me. But the lime-juice drool came out nicely I think, and the pith-scar too (used same technique to improve igor's scars and when i did the comedian watchlime). So all in all I rather like him after all.

Key lime - Is that what key lime is? Some kind of jelly stuff made of lime that goes in pies? I'm not sure. Anyway - this is an interpretation of the KoL key lime joke.

Skewered/sliced lime - The skewered lime is an actual KoL item and so needed to be represented. In the process I made a lime cross-section. I liked the look of the sliced lime and wanted to include it just for that, but couldn't come up with an amusing name/caption. So in the end I just stuck it next to the skewered lime to sort of imply that that was what was left of the lime that segment was taken from.

Professor lime - Last one I added to the poster. Not terribly happy with it. Mortar boards tougher than expected.

Sabre-toothed salad salad - Salad is hilarious.

Suddenly; armoured guys.

Sudden unexpected productivity! Inspiration hit this morning and I managed to get these done in pretty short order. No complications, no real difficulties, no burnout. Unexpected, but I'm not going to complain.

It was the collars you see - I saw a breastplate with a really nice tall, open collar and when I tried to scribble on of my own, these came out. The swooshy cloth roby-thing covering their right leg was an idea I yoinked from some half-remembered Rackham miniature I once saw. Saves me having to do a symmetrical set of complicated plate-armoured legs. Implying complex 3d shapes with 2d outlines is easy - but doing the same shape twice from different angles to order is hard. besides, the cloth looks kind of cool and helps moderate the nodecount and level of detail.

Fairly complicated by my standards, but (possibly due to the limes) I think they're allowable. Oops - just noticed that I missed the second guy's axe - that quad shape on the blade is meant to be a gap. No big deal - this is just a quick white-out to make 'em look a little more presentable here.

So, armour. Lots and lots of armour. Fun. Not sure how interchangable the bits are. I kind of themes the armours, so #2 has that curved/pointy thing going on, while #3 has the triple-layer. I oculd probably get away with mix and match still. Interesting (to me) how different the looks are. #1 seems like a warrior-monk kind of guy, probably because that weird armoured headband is remeniscent of a tonsure. #2 Seems like a paladin or generic knight for reasons I'm unsure of, while #3's banded armour makes him look a bit more menacing and sophisticated.

Lime crisis

I've gotten kind of distracted from my vector peeps lately. Perhaps I need a new angle of attack or just a new project to overthink.

Still, not doing veeps doesn't mean I've not been doing anything. I play Kingdom Of Loathing a lot, and one of its iconic images is the sabre-toothed lime. One day I drew a lime in inkscape (to fill up a blank spot in a KoL-related flowchart) and it grew on me. I felt like doing something vaguely interesting with it and I was bored, so I copied and pasted it a few times and started noodling with them.

This was the first batch. Kind of mediocre, though I like what I came up with for a lime skeleton though. I reckon that if sabre-toothed limes have skeletons, that's what they look like.

So, to say that they went down down well would be an understatement. So I did some more. There was no shortage of ideas. I mean you've seen this kind of thing before, right? A single image or character modded slightly and wittily captioned? I can't remember exactly where I've seen it done, probably overpriced university posters, but it's a known technique.

Anyway - I embraced that and started churning out limes. Which was great fun. They're easy to do, I'm working off a simple template with no post-vector colouring or texturing attempts. I'd had a fair bit of practice with inkscape recently (as demonstrated on this blog) and this was all the same techniques, so it went easier. Slightly different style and conventions so it was a bit of a change. In fact, because I wasn't making a deliberate effort to keep nodes to a minimum, it was actually easier than some of the veep stuff. The lime skeleton's teeth or the igor lime's stitches are examples of the kind of indulgence I allowed myself. Squidgy hats were another, though not seen here.

Fun times.

I ended up doing seventy-seven in all, plus some bonus. I'll pop them up here with commentary in lieu of doing anything new I think. It's fun to talk through this stuff.

Firefox

Gasp! Colour! I didn't expect this, it just sort of happened.

Obviously elemental foxes - fire and unconvincing-ice. I like these. They're not great, but I like them. Probably because, like the crab mutants way back when, I wasn't trying to do vaguely plausible light and shadow, but creating a texture/pattern that provides enough detail on its own.

I am a slave to patterns, so I'll probably try and do some other elemental foxes. I've worked out a tail design for an electrical fox (flickerfox?) but need another pose. If I wanted to be all cheaty I could re-use these two poses and do one of each for each element, but that'd be... cheaty.

On the other hand, variants are basically a no-go here. What could I possibly vary? Tail-swoosh? Head angle? Petty stuff you probably wouldn't even notice.

So, yeah. I'm happy with these. They ain't art, but I had fun doin' 'em and, havin' done 'em, I like 'em.

Squagus and friends.

It's short for "squid magus". Placeholder names are fun, in that they don't have to make sense to anybody but myself. Favourite so far: "psycho cheeseborg". What can I say; it quacked like a duck.

The squagus himself has been in this semi-finished state for some time - I did him during my brine mutant phase. I wasn't happy with him though. Shapeless robe, symmetrical pose and gribbly tentacles. Too easy. Lazy. The only bit even vaguely interesting is the gill-fin-ear shape on the side of the head.

Anyway, today I was squiggling (squiddling?) and I got two semi-satisfactory giant tentacles. I'd always intended to do some giant tentacles for the brine mutants, but... hadn't. Tentacles are both easy and hard to do. They're a very simple shape and vector drawing makes curves a breeze. But they need to have a certain amount of itnerest to be worth doing at all and twisting shapes with a definite cross-section are tricky for me to think around. These are a barely acceptable kludge to me.

To make them match up with the squagus I quickly block-filled them. Those blue-green things at their bases are emant to be water-splashes, like the tentacles are bursting up out of the sea. They're supposed to be the limbs of some huge krakenish thing the squagus has summoned. Possibly even the cult's elder fish god.

Tentacles. Not terribly exciting, but necessary to me. And I'm warming (a little) to the squagus, when he's in their company. Maybe. Ish.

Hungry natives

So, colouring is still not really happening. Which is bad. But I'm still puttering along, which is ok.

Here's some culturally ambiguous, miscellaneously exotic jungle/island indigenous peoples. Please note that for maximum offensive cultural stereotyping they are even waving spears.

The pseudo-tiki masks were fun to do. It's a shame that I only do three variants because doing a bunch of different masks could be really fun. Maybe I'll get a chance if I come up with another "native" type. I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking regarding the shape of #3's mask - soemthing about the angle making the fourth corner seem to disappear? Too scared that I'll cause knock-on problems to the face design if I try and fix it.

I had so much fun with the big masks and crazy hair that I had difficulties differentiating them elsewhere. Copped out on the spears - they all have the same head, just different decoration. I was originally thinking I could totally change the weapons so one had a spear, one a sword, one a club (or whatever) but I oculdn't get the pose to work with non-spear weaponry without straying over the edge of the frame.

Also: dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are hard - their body shapes don't like to fit in small square spaces.

The leftmost one I did a while back. I think I might need to colour him before I can decide whether or not he's worthy - I like the idea of the pose but I just can't judge whether I pulled it off or not. Also he has cheapo mirrored feet, which I probably ought to redo.

Death-chicken was more recent and while I don't like him as much as lefty, I'm happier with him. He also has more fiddly details that I could biddle with for variants - mouth and crest mainly. Lefty's got a nice simple look going, but that limits the possibility for tweaks.

They've both got those dromaesaur claws going on. Now I'm thinking that the left guy would look better without them. Thing is that they're nice easy, identifiable and node-cheap foot detail. Low hanging fruit.

I imagine these dinos live in the same jungle-riverish area as the natives above. Pretty generic I know, but maybe I'll come up with some kind of twist later.